


Flash Bang

by givemeunicorns



Series: MCU tumblr prompts [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fireworks, M/M, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 16:33:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2435525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/givemeunicorns/pseuds/givemeunicorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: someone doesn't like fireworks</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flash Bang

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: I don't own these characters and i make no money

The first time it happened to Steve, he was still fresh from the thaw, still wrung out and struggling with the weight of seventy years unaccounted for. In those first days, he couldn't bring himself to own anything more advanced than a microwave, couldn't stand the crowds that had once made him smile and his fingers itch for a pencil because people were the life blood of this city. His darling New York, his Brooklyn, had become too loud and too bright to handle.

He usually only left the house at night in those days, went down to the gym in his old part of town. There was a fella who owned the place, his father had grown up on Steve's block and he in turn had grown up with stories about Steve before he was Cap, about Bucky before he was a soldier. The man knew him from pictures, the moment he saw him, offered him a key when Steve insisted he pay for memebership.

It had been a rough day for Steve, his birthday in fact. He'd forced himself out of the house, to the flowershop. He vistied Peggy, who had been more lucid than usual, which was good. But visiting mom, and Bucky, and Mr. and Mrs. Barnes had drained all the pleasantness out of him. The city that he'd once loved more than anything now exhausted him. There was the weight of too many memories. He thought, sometimes, about moving somewhere else, starting over, but some part of him couldn't. Brooklyn, for all it had changed, was the only familiar thing he had left.

He was hitting the sand bags, when he heard the first pop, and his muscles tensed, ready to fight. It was the fourth of July, he told himself, just fireworks. But the pop and fizz wormed into his brain, until his heart pounded painfully against his ribs, his muscles shaking. He blinked, tried to push down the memories but ever pop was the sound of a bomb going off, every whistle was the cold mountain wind ripping through the train's torn side as he reached for Bucky's hand, every screech was metal sliding on ice right before his world went black for nearly a lifetime. He found a stereo and turned it up loud as it would go and punched the bag until his knuckles bled. Steve knew how to push through pain, long before his body was weapon.

Sam didn't expect it, or maybe he did and just pretended he didn't. It was after his first tour, early on, when he still protested that he was okay, that he was normal, that he didn't imagine blood on his hands, or wake up screaming in the night time. Back when he pretended he didn't see the worried looks on his family's faces, the way his hair stood on end when the kids ran through the house, squealing in childish delight that his brain kept computing as terror.

He'd been as a family barbeque, in a lawn chair with a bear in his hand and neice on his lap, ready to watch the sky light up. He'd been fine through the pop of sparklers, even though they sounded like a fuse, he'd smiled and laughed, reminded himself not to jerk away from the hands that slapped his shoulders goodnaturedly.

But the first screaming pop had made his guts drop right to his knees and he must had been shaking, because Mya looked up at him with childish concern, tugging on his shirt.

“What's wrong uncle Sam? I thought you like fire works?”

He forced a smile.

“I do baby,” he patted her head, passing her to his own mother, “I just don't feel good right now. I'll be right back.”

He tried not to slam the sliding door as he hurried into the house. He could feel his chest heaving, even as he tried to remind himself to breath, the vice around his ribs got tighter. He spent over and hour in his parents shower, trying to bloke out the sound and remember how to breath, trying to wipe away the memories of screaming children, blood on the sand, limbs absent bodies, the aftermath left for medics to sort in the wake of a bomb.

Bucky at least, had been prepared for it. Sam and Steve had looked on the calandar and shuttered collectively. He'd barely started living with them then, still standoffish about the name he wasn't sure belonged to him, head still too full of conflicting voices that sometimes he wasn't sure who or where or when he was. They'd still been his keeper then, men who were once his mission but now seemed to offering him a layer of protection. If he stayed with them, he wouldn't be put in a cage.

The warned him of the loud noises to come, of what might happen and he had calibrate the information as he did everything else in those days, with logic, wading through all the muck in his head to find the best solution, the most relevant training to suppress any unneeded reaction.

It hadn't worked.

The first pop, even from a distance he could measure with sound, had made his muscles tense. He grit his teeth, forced himself to stillness while he waited it out. It was not a bomb, he told himself, it was not a mistake, not a miscalculation. He had set no triggers, he had not killed anyone one. This was not his doing. But the longer the sounds drug on, squealing, fizzing, popping, sounds too much like the machines they'd turned on him, the more the control began to unravel. His body ached with the phantom pricks of a thousand needles, invisible scalpels drug across his skin. Sitting in the chair, a safe distance from them with the tv blaring, he thought he'd been safe.

It was the Falcon who approached him, rested a hand on his knee. He looked drawn himself.

“Want to come sit with us?” he'd asked and Bucky had uncurled stiffly, trying to take the spot between them without touching them.

But a scream and boom, too close to the house ratted him and he crammed his hands over his ears. A hand rested on his shoulder, and Rogers looked at him with those blue eyes, familiar nd sad and utterly infuriating. He didn't think about the action, just acted, leaning into Steve's body, cruling into the bigger man's chest, trying to be as small as possible. He remembered once how small and fragile this body had been, remembered holding and sheltering it when sickness in his lungs threatened to rattled Steve apart. Steve wrapped around him like armor, held him so tight he couldn't breath. It was the first time, he realized later, that he had initiated any contact with a person he wasn't fighting, in a very long time.

These days, they spend Steve's birthday in one of Stark's vacation homes, away from the sounds of human revelry and with the firm promise they wouldn't, as Stark put it, “do it anywhere but the guest bedroom.” Steve was convinced he had Jarvis watching them, just to make sure.

 


End file.
